Lack of empirical evidence

There are some places online within the autism community where it would appear that if you don’t follow that particular group’s hive mind towards certain methods like Rapid Prompting Method – you might as well just not go there.

For those who don’t know, Rapid Prompting Method is a method of communication devised by Soma Mukhopadhyay that helped teach her autistic son to communicate. It typically involves the use of letter board, keyboard or ipads. So what’s the problem? Well – it lacks any empirical data for actually working and the studies that have been done on it are few and far between (not to mentioned largely associated with the HALO Centre where RPM and Soma are based -you see the conflict of interest I’m sure). If you Google around you can find a number of blogs which make the claim that they are written independently by people who learned to type using RPM. That’s fine, but it’s not exactly evidence because I could upload a post telling you all that I am non-verbal and learn to communicate using RPM – it’s easy to lie on the internet, people do it every day. There are a few videos as well – and these are much better. Of the range of videos I’ve seen there are perhaps half that I am happy to accept as evidence of independent typing? A lot of the videos that I don’t consider good evidence involve a person holding and moving a letter board around as someone points, and many of those have multiple instances where the individual communicating points at a letter or multiple letters that aren’t read out before landing on the “right one”.

So dubious evidence at best, but it’s certainly got the potential to teach non-verbal people to communicate via pointing or typing. The other issue many other people have is with the similarities between RPM and Facilitated Communication, the latter of which has been linked to a wide range of abusive incidents and false allegations. It certainly seems a bit more difficult to manipulate what a person is communicating with RPM, but it’s not impossible. Given that a number of autistic people have been abused as a result of FC, and at least one boy was murdered, you would think that a cautious and collected view of RPM would be the norm?

Well – it is mostly, but there are absolutely some parts of the autism community who are not only adamanant that it works but who figuratively tear apart anyone who displays any kind of doubt over it. There’s always that same phrase of “assume competence”, and you know what – that’s a nice phrase but it doesn’t always work. Say for example we get someone using RPM who expresses a desire to be involved in a sexual relationship with the person who helps them communicate (an incident that has occured in FC), I want to be damn well sure that the person communicating is the person who thinks and feels that before I’m going to be okay with it.

For all the arguments from the autistic community about respecting everyone on the spectrum, when people argue so aggressively and rigidly about how RPM should be used with all non-verbal people I can’t help but feel like it’s saying that people only have value if they can produce long pieces of prose like Tito Mukhopadhyay and Ido Kedar. Everytime you bring up the fact that not everyone is going to be able to access the National Curriculum or will take a very long time to communicate past the basics of “I want” there’s always someone who crops up and says “Yes but it’s really hard to test the capability of autistic people, look at RPM and what the people who learnt to use it had to say…”, that’s great and everything but it sounds like you’re trying to brush off the fact that some autistic and/or non-verbal people also have severe or profound learning difficulties.

RPM isn’t proven, and even if it does work for some people it’s not going to work for all autistic people. It also needs a damn sight more empirical data before I accept it as a reliable method.